On Pluto, the Sun is only a spectacularly bright star. It’s easy to pick out, hanging low in the sky—only just visible in the domed window in the hub of Sagacity Station. If Mariam could reach up and hold back the Sun, if she could slow its progress down the sky, she would. She can’t, of course. Just another bead to add to the strand of impossibilities hung around her neck.

A scuff on the floor behind her breaks her gaze from the starfield overhead. Captain Valencia stands there, waiting. The pale fluorescent light from the station walls disappears into the hard, dark planes of his face. His forehead is Tombaugh Regio, the deep valleys of his cheeks are the shadows at the foot of Wright Mons. All the contrast of Pluto’s surface, but not nearly so cold. His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles.

I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door.

You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage.

“Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?”

You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.

The fighting spider sat heavily in Kian Boon’s left palm, where he’d knocked it from its leafy abode. It was maybe a centimeter and a half from the tip of its pedipalps to the silky spinnerets of its abdomen, black and silver like one of the sleek Chinese centipedals that increasingly frequented the roads below his building. He could feel the weight of the thing as he cupped his hand around it and it jumped, smacking against the roof of his fingers.

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

It’ll be fun, he’d said. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to be looking for romance, it’s just a good way to meet people.

“I don’t think it’s about romance at all,” Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. “I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he’d have to resign.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve never had a vampire congressman,” Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. “Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light.”

Njàbò, my only child, my daughter, walks with me. She is as old as the forest, while I was born but three and a half decades ago. Our ears prick up at the sound of drums. We scan the sky and spot a column of smoke to the northwest. We run toward it. The ground trembles under our feet.

The settlement is ringed by rotting carcasses. Their faces are mutilated, but the meat is left uneaten. These are the bodies of our people.

I weep, but Njàbò is past tears. She sheds her calf body. Njàbò the great, the wise, the ancient thunders with anger; her flapping ears rouse the wind.

Not in its individual parts, but as a whole. It covers everything, smothers everything. It blows continents open with opportunity. Much of that opportunity is for death, for carcasses hung up and split open in massive consumption, a grind of bone and blood, but for some the opportunity is a tool for all that. Something to insert into the space between ribs, to lever open and dissect.

Not everyone dies in war. Not everyone sinks into blank nothingness, into unmarked graves and mass burials, into fields turned red and mud that stinks of iron. Some fight with symbols instead of flesh, their weapons heady and hidden, and it is in combination and in permutation that Turing finds his battleground.

Up along the edge of the ridge, Gordon could see them gathering. The mass of bugs formed a ragged silhouette against the hazy lavender sky. Each critter stood only ankle-high—about as big as a yappy dog—six-legged, like ants, with azure exoskeletons hard as crash helmets. Individually they posed little threat, but if only a few of them spooked, panic could ripple through the herd, bringing all thirty thousand of them swarming down.

The stampede could crush him and Paint flat.

From his position at the bottom of the crater, Gordon gave a long chirping whistle. Amplified by his hardsuit’s external speaker, the trill echoed through the crater. Gordon imagined it lifting up through the thin atmosphere to reach the three rings that encircled New Saturn. Here, near the equator, the rings bisected the sky in a thin, glittering band, shining apricot and peach, reflecting the light of the G-class star that shone down on him.

A few of the bugs—called microbe-seeding terrestrial injectors or MSTIs, by the terraforming corporations that had genetically engineered them—turned their attention toward Gordon at the sound, but still hesitated. The bugs were naturally fearful of new territory, preferring to follow the scent trails previously laid down by other bugs.

Gordon had loaded new scent into Paint’s dispersal unit before riding down into the crater, so he knew a perfectly good trail existed. The bugs should be following him to the center of the crater, where Gordon had spread a banquet of feed—so many white pellets they almost obscured the fine pink sand.

The first time Sir Palamedes is tempted to give up pursuing the Questing Beast, he is tramping through the woods on a bleak winter day, his frosty breath hanging in a white cloud each time he exhales. His feet are sore, and his shoes are worn thin. His horse went lame a week ago, and is returning home in the uncertain care of Palamedes’ squire. Palamedes is following the sound of distant barking, and is beginning to think the sound will drive him mad.

He is far off any beaten track, although he can see the prints of men and horses frozen into the icy turf. They might have been following the Questing Beast themselves, overcome with wonder at a sight that Palamedes is beginning to find commonplace. Or they might have been about some other errand entirely. They might even now be sipping mulled wine by a warm fire at home, rather than tramping through the woods after an abominable beast.

I have ridden dinosaurs. Big, bitey ones. I’ve traveled on the Hindenburg, fought alongside Joan of Arc, punched Jack the Ripper right in the face.

The point I’m trying to make is being a time traveler puts you in some scary situations, but this is easily the most terrifying.

Asking out a pretty girl.

(Insert shriek of terror here.)

I’ve been putting it off, shoving it to that dusty place in the back of my mind where I keep things I’m afraid of—like the fact that house centipedes exist—but it has to be now, before she goes back home.

I take a deep breath, my heart beating like a drum roll, and step into the lab.